A Naked Singularity

by Sergio de la Pava

A teeming multitude with its components angling desperately for their just portion of the surrounding air and now you’re ready to declare Hobbes victorious over Rousseau with scant need for further deliberation.

Only the unimaginative fear death when it’s oblivion that cuts deepest. Next time you burrow into the subway picture the aerial view. Ants.”

He must have a special talent in this limited area. Remember Dane, this isn’t Alexander the Great conquering most of the known world or Napoleon cutting a swath through Europe for Chrissakes. This is a guy kissing untold quantities of ass to put himself in a position where a woefully underinformed electorate can deem him slightly less offensive than the other guy trying out for the job.

“Family,” he repeated as if I’d told him I had a werewolf butler.

“The third possibility is more like a tremendously strong probability and is the one all sane, sentient beings should subscribe to. In this one death is a real end. No more consciousness, no more anything. This one scares the shit out of people but it shouldn’t. Someone explain to me what’s so bad about not existing? I know it’s bad to be sick or in pain. I know it’s bad to be sad or in other psychic pain but I can’t for the life of me get too worked up about the possibility of not feeling anything. As human beings we don’t sit around in dread recalling the days before we existed.”

Now my mother was hugging both of Marcela’s kids simultaneously, calling Mary Maria and Timothy some concatenation of phonemes I can’t possibly hope to replicate.

The rooster crows and now this clown has some rising and shining to do, must report to his cubicle to ride that carpal tunnel.

People sit around and pour the stuff down their gullets as quick as old Joe can keep it coming and if it would get their bloodstreams to kick the shit to their brains faster they’d pay extra. They’d pay extra because alcohol is a depressant and they need depressing. But more than that they need to disappear. They need to disrupt, if only for a limited time, their constant, tyrannical self-surveillance. The drunk person is not happy in the classic sense. Inebriation is instead prized for its liberating qualities. What they’re liberated from is insecurity and if you don’t think that’s psychologically addictive you’re crazy.

Blind effort without sufficient aforethought, regardless of how strenuous, is the near-antithesis of perfection.

For the rest of my life I would know what I had always suspected, that I was not bound by the limitations of the average person. I was better, and better in a way that couldn’t be quantified. I would stand alone in my perfection. I would be greater than God. God is perfect merely by definition. And it is his tautological perfection, not his own will, that makes his every deed perfect. I on the other hand would have created perfection out of imperfection, an altogether greater achievement.

“Reminds me of the moment man ceased merely gazing skyward with sidereal awe and in its stead resolved to one day inherit those stars.”

To the extent that I have good qualities, they are the product of fortunate genetics and brilliant rearing, thank you cute Mom (responsorial smile). On the other hand, any undesirable qualities or circumstances that I face are solely the function of my own individual and self-generated neglect, sloth, insecurity, avarice, pettiness, selfishness, insincerity, jealousy and other embarrassing causes too numerous to mention. Isn’t that great? This realization is the key to my newfound happiness because of the amazing power it invests in me and remember that power is happiness. What’s misery on the other hand? Well, lack of freedom and its resulting absence of power.”

“Correct, chance. I have something like a chance theory if you’ll just give me a chance to give it to you.” “Proceed.” “Here goes: I say there’s a chance that retaining a psych expert will prevent Kingg from being executed right? What I seem to be saying is that if I take a certain action, create a certain event, then a later desirable event may occur as a result. We say these kinds of things all the time and the statements are primarily a function of how we experience Time, that is, in a linear fashion. But of course as many have shown we have no legitimate basis for believing that how we experience the world, including things like Time, corresponds perfectly to ultimate reality, that is, the things causing, in a manner of speaking, the experiences. In fact we can provide many examples of verifiable phenomena, such as the particle/wave duality of certain entities, that seem to contradict the manner in which experience tells us the world works. Similarly, with Time the fact that we experience it as a linear procession of events does not mean that’s what Time truly is; or that it even exists for that matter. So let’s posit a possible description of true Time. Basically, imagine a vantage point with respect to Time whereby you can see all events at once. When you observe it from this vantage point, Time is not linear. Instead, from this view, you see that events that exist in spacetime do not really precede or follow each other and therefore probably cannot be said to cause ...

B.M. stood for Big Mac he declared as he introduced himself and I questioned, to his face, the legitimacy of using initials to shorten what, in Big Mac, amounted to a nickname itself; to which he responded that he had not the slightest idea what I was talking about since Big Mac was his true, parentally-bestowed, on-the-birth-certificate name.

Except that now, fully awake and armed with audio, I saw that the movie was entitled Terms of Bereavement and it was actually a comedy. But not a good comedy where witty people trip and wear funny outfits either, rather one that relied principally on the smug knowingness of its audience. A comedy in name only, neither divine nor vulgar. A comedy in error, full of irony and self-reference and signifying an empty nil.

And as Alana said these things she began to fade from view and hearing until she disappeared entirely and I sat alone in the moving car. It was one of those times when you sense that something critical but indefinable that relates to your life and how it’s lived has ended irrevocably and so you feel an anxious loss. Out of this solemn desinence I felt various incunabula threaten to emerge none of which promised anything of even slight appeal.

Remember that because right now it is certainly at least possible that you and I will go get that money, that means at least two of our counterparts will in fact get it. Don’t we need to be those two? Of course we do, it absolutely must be us. I don’t care what it entails. You have total power and control here. You just have to decide who you want to be and that’s who you’ll become.”

I looked up just in time to witness a celestial transfiguration. The new terrestrial darkness allowed the heretofore invisible above to emerge, as the sky, now cleansed of all mortal light, became dotted with astral pinpoints. I went out and wandered the streets; for the first time in that hyperkinetic place, walking beneath the stars.

Today’s Citibank temperature is absolute zero. Once again the current Citibank temperature in Central Park is absolute zero. That temperature is bought to you by Citibank. Citibank. If you bank in the city, bank on Citibank to do your city banking. Citibank. You can bank on them. Back to you Dave. Jim I thought the Third Law of Thermodynamics pretty much forbade that temperature from ever being reached. I have no idea what you’re talking about Dave. I just report the number, I don’t get involved with the legalities of the situation or any of those other extracurricular shenanigans. Okay, well I wonder, Jim, if there are any special precautions our listeners should take given that the temperature is absolute zero. Absolute zero is rather cold is it not? Good question Dave and yes absolute zero is indeed cold as in the generally accepted value of minus 273.15 degrees Celsius and I don’t even want to get into what that means on a Fahrenheit or even Kelvin scale. The precautions Jim. Right, well in terms of precautions there really are none adequate to the situation. I suppose I would counsel people to stay indoors for one. If you go outdoors you will die. The cold will stop your heart in its very tracks, petrify your flesh, and freeze your blood so that it ceases to circulate. You will die. What about the homeless Jim? They’re not listening to this Dave, they’re already dead.

“Meaning I’ve seen the light and now realize that terms like social science are devoid of meaning. Psychology is no more a science than astrology and here I was studying it like some hairy caveman magically transported centuries forward in time and oblivious to the news; the news being that in Science man has found his long-sought panacea to all that ails us. Really, how did you keep from laughing when I would tell you I was a psych major?”

I started to have strange doubts. I allowed myself to think that maybe I really was the only existing person in the world. After all, I could never truly know that anyone else existed, at least not the way I knew, at that very moment, that I existed and was shaking uncontrollably. Maybe I was just a brain in a vat with some alien clown going overboard while stimulating the area for unfathomably cold. So that’s where I was; the quiet I had longed for for such a long time had finally come and I found that more than anything it caused me to doubt the very material world that had left me hugging only myself.

When I looked up from the floor I found I could see Everything. I saw the fundaments of the universe; quarks and neutrinos in visible ubiquity, jittering and bouncing, off each other and onto me. I saw Time itself, the fourth dimension, naked and enormous in its full horror, neither flowing nor frozen, and beside it the relativistic Elsewhere, lifeless and defunct. I saw Music, not the notes or the sounds but what it verily was. I saw incomplete but beautiful Math, its integers and the rules they obeyed, and I understood it all. I saw minds. I saw thoughts, disembodied but clear. I stared at consciousness itself, saw what it looked like, and became frightened. Concepts were visible; I saw Justice and Cowardice, Enmity and Envy. I saw leprous bodies piled high, discarded by what had animated them and seemingly congealing into a single mass of fibrous muscle and cartilage. I saw the unborn and the dead as they clawed at the living. And the living weren’t healthy. They were diseased and deformed, with arms where legs should be and skin peeling to expose ambiguity where distinction was needed. I watched flesh devour flesh and heard bones crack from weight and from that moment on I started hearing everything as well. I heard colors and circles, trees and triangles. I heard Fear lick the face of Hate accompanied by a final whispered scream. Then I heard, felt, and saw the world begin to crack open to admit, little by little, the return of Light. The light dispersed everything el...

The growth of technology and knowledge has not recently been steady, it’s been exponential. If you magically transported a man from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. he would eventually adjust to the intervening changes. But take a man from as recent as 1800 and put him in our world with handheld computers and planes and particle accelerators and satellites and space exploration and ATMs and cell phones and nuclear power plants and he would lose his limited mind in about five hours! The same is true of us if we could travel into the future. After all the guy in 1800 didn’t think there was a lot left to invent and discover did he? He couldn’t have conceived of this right? So obviously things are going to happen in the next centuries that we cannot now even conceive of. The future world will be more unrecognizable to us than our present one would be to the 1800 guy. I used to say that in five hundred years we will not recognize human beings or society because of things like the Human Genome Project but now I see that it’s going to come a lot sooner than that. And that, my friend, is why Dark Energy is all that matters right now. Because we are going to solve the ultimate riddles of the universe and ensure that this remarkable force that ensures universal progress and immortality is bent to our will.

There I stood, rooted, waiting for the disordered wave to arrive. The wave sped in approach and would either carry stellar material from the farthest reaches of the universe and bury it violently into our very bodies or else take what was already within us, that which was central to our core, and from it form new stars.